A 32-year-old man died after reportedly plunging 40ft from an escalator following the opening night of The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour in Philadelphia.

The incident took place at Lincoln Financial Field at 10.47pm last Thursday (14 July). Police say the man, whose identity has not yet been released, had been sitting on the escalator rail before he fell and suffered major head trauma. He was rushed to hospital but was pronounced dead just after midnight on Friday.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that no foul play is suspected and the fall appears to have been accidental.

Bob Lange, SVP of communications for the Philadelphia Eagles, which operates the stadium, told the Inquirer he believed the concert was over and people were leaving at the time of the incident. Tour promoter Live Nation is yet to comment.

The preceding show marked the belated start of The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn global stadium run, which was previously rescheduled three separate times due to the pandemic.

THE TOUR’S SCHEDULED OPENING NIGHT AT TORONTO’S ROGERS CENTRE IN CANADA WAS POSTPONED DUE TO A POWER OUTAGE

The tour’s scheduled opening night in Canada was postponed due to a power outage. The singer-songwriter’s 8 July hometown show at Toronto’s Rogers Centre was pulled after telecoms giant Rogers Communications, which owns the 55,000-cap venue, experienced a major service outage affecting more than 12 million users.

According to The Globe and Mail, the network failure impacted critical venue operations, including security, point-of-sale functions and ticket processing. Live Nation says it was impossible to even open the doors to the venue.

Live Nation-promoted shows by Keith Urban and Roger Waters were able to go ahead at Budweiser Stage and Scotiabank Arena, respectively.

A spokesperson for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns and operates Scotiabank Arena, told the publication the outage mostly affected access to mobile tickets, prompting the venue to provide free Wi-Fi on site as a solution, while Waters’ performance was delayed to accommodate delayed ticket-holders.

THE WEEKND’S AFTER HOURS TOUR WAS ORIGINALLY SCHEDULED TO HIT ARENAS IN JUNE 2020

Rogers president and CEO Tony Staffieri apologised in a message to customers.

“We now believe we’ve narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction,” he said. “We disconnected the specific equipment and redirected traffic, which allowed our network and services to come back online over time as we managed traffic volumes returning to normal levels.”

The Weeknd’s After Hours tour was originally scheduled to hit 105 arena dates beginning June 2020, but was postponed due to the pandemic – first to 2021 then January 2022 and finally to summer 2022. Retooled as the After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour, the North American leg is slated to wrap up with a two-night stand at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium from 2-3 September, with international dates still to be announced.

The rejuvenated tour came after The Weeknd scored the longest-charting Billboard Hot 100 song of all time with Blinding Lights and the second longest-running No.1 album on the Billboard 200 for 2020 with After Hours.

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